Languages

Hats and Doctors

Daisy Rockwell’s translation of the late Upendranath Ashk ♦ Daisy Rockwell’s translation of Hindi-Urdu writer Upendranath Ashk’s short stories is more of a teaser than a complete introduction to the Jalandhar-born author. Rockwell, who also edited the collection, had the fortune to meet Ashk a year before he died in Allahabad in 1996. She admiringly characterises …

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Going off script

A cross-border blog spreads the word of South Asian literature ♦ In India, Pakistani writers in English are considered common property. Their books are often published here first, and writers like Mohammed Hanif, Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie and Nadeem Aslam frequent our literary festivals. But when it comes to contemporary Hindi or Urdu fiction crossing the …

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Delhi dictionary

Mind your language ♦ From Time Out Delhi, March 2013 The word “kedgeree”, according to The Concise Hobson-Jobson, “appears to have been applied metaphorically to mixtures of sundry kinds and also to jargon or lingua franca.” That definition, from the Anglo-Indian glossary first published in 1886, still finds a place in this issue’s cover story: …

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Mind your language

Learning Urdu in Delhi ♦ Growing up mostly in the US, my Hindi instruction was limited to brief bouts of Sunday school and reading that ubiquitous Children’s Book Trust Panchatantra with my mother. I did all right, but my family’s own connection to reading Hindi was slight, given that half wrote in Gujarati and the …

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Bridges, not barriers

Delhi’s new literary festival is an appropriately polyglot affair ♦ If India is, as Mark Twain put it, “the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues”, then Delhi is the place where all  these nations and tongues inevitably meet. This fortnight, a new festival acknowledges the importance of the capital as a literary destination …

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